Widow's Tears (24 page)

“I thought you'd like the view from this window,” Claire said, going to the door. Carelessly, over her shoulder, she said, “In case anything bothers you in the night, my room is right through that door.” She pointed to a white-painted door in the wall beside one of the beds. “Just come on in and wake me up—if I'm not awake already.”

“Bothers me?” Ruby asked, frowning apprehensively. “Like…how?”

“Well…” Claire hesitated. “I sometimes hear sobbing. And water dripping. And the wind.”

Ruby thought of the sobs she had heard—well, almost heard—in the cemetery. “What else?”

Another hesitation. “I don't think there's anything that will hurt you, if that's what you're asking,” Claire said, a little stiffly. “If I did, I probably wouldn't be here myself. And I certainly wouldn't have invited you to come.”

“I didn't mean that, exactly,” Ruby said, although she had been wondering, a little nervously, if there was any danger. So far, the manifestations hadn't seemed threatening, but—

“It's all very scary, I know.” Claire sighed. “But I've never sensed anything malicious or evil about any of it. I think we'll be okay.” She added, “The bathroom is two doors down on the left, just past my room. Come down to the kitchen whenever you're ready. I was thinking spaghetti for supper—store-bought sauce and definitely non-gourmet, but it's easy. And we have the salad fixings that Kitty left, and some hard-boiled eggs.” She gave a short laugh. “I'd offer you some wine, but I don't keep it in the house, for obvious reasons.”

“I can do without wine,” Ruby said. “But don't forget the pie. Oh, and let's eat in the morning room, if it's okay with you. There's something about that kitchen—” She shivered.

“What's the matter?” Claire asked, making a comic face. “You're afraid Rachel might whap us over the head with a skillet?”

“I agree—she doesn't seem to be the malicious type,” Ruby replied lightly. “But that's what people said about Lizzie Borden. And don't forget that we were very nearly fried by that lightning bolt.” They both laughed as Claire left the room.

As Ruby unpacked, she glanced out the window and saw a white-tailed doe with a pair of twin spotted fawns at her side, coming down to the creek to drink. Mother and babies—a reminder, somehow, of the mute cluster of small, sad stone crosses in the cemetery. What had happened here? How had those children, and their father, died? Had Rachel herself committed some unthinkable crime and been sentenced to mourn forever in this house?

And what about the three other people who were buried in the cemetery? Hazel Penland was Claire's aunt—there wasn't much mystery about her.
But who were Patsy Hill and Colleen O'Reilly? Had they lived here, servants in the house before Claire's aunt came? Which would have been when? What year? Ruby realized that she didn't know, and made a mental note to ask Claire.

Colleen O'Reilly. Ruby stood still in the middle of the room, feeling suddenly that she needed to know who that person was. She focused, trying to remember what Gram Gifford had said about her mother—whose name, Ruby was now sure, had been Colleen O'Reilly. But the conversations had been so long ago, in another life almost, and nothing came, nothing more than the recollection of hearing Gram say that her mother had died in a storm—swept out to sea when she went to help a friend. And there wasn't anybody left on that side of the family who could fill in the blanks.

Still thinking, Ruby pulled off her sundress and hung it in the closet, then changed into a pair of comfortable jeans and a green-and-peach striped pullover and went out into the hall, where she stood for a moment getting her bearings. Claire was busy in the kitchen—maybe now would be a good time to do a little exploring. If she remembered right, Claire had said the nursery was on the second floor.

Ruby's room was at one end of the hallway, opposite the stair. Along the hall, there were four doors on each side, eight altogether. Claire had said her room was the next door on the left, so Ruby skipped that one, then opened the other doors one by one. She didn't have to turn the lights on. A strange, pearly gray twilight hung over the house, and the windows in each room and at the ends of the hall let in enough light so that she could see.

On the other side of Claire's bedroom, the bathroom was large and old-fashioned, with a deep claw-foot tub, a white tile floor, and a porcelain sink with a medicine cabinet and mirror over it. The walls were the same pale yellow as the morning room downstairs, and the room smelled of fresh paint—one of Claire's fix-up projects, Ruby guessed.

The four bedrooms on the other side of the hall were about the same size as Ruby's, but with green wallpaper, or lavender, beige, or yellow, each one furnished with a bureau, a chair, and a bed with a coverlet in the same color as the wallpaper. But none of them felt occupied or personal—no pictures on the wall, nothing but the minimum of furniture. If anyone—the children, especially—had slept in these rooms for any length of time, they had left nothing of themselves behind. But then Ruby remembered Claire saying that Mr. Hoover had packed up the china from the dining room and some of the things in the music room, with the idea of renting the house. Maybe any personal items from the bedrooms had been packed, as well.

The bedroom on the other side of the bathroom was more spacious and much better furnished, with a huge arched headboard and footboard carved out of some sort of dark, highly polished wood. There was a mirrored dresser and a matching bureau to match, a gilt-framed full-length chevron mirror in the corner, and an ornately patterned rug in shades of red and blue covering most of the floor. It had to be the master bedroom, Ruby thought, where Rachel and Augustus had slept, although this room, like the others, had been stripped of anything personal. There were no family photographs, no toilet articles, not even a doily. She stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting for—what? She didn't know, except that even though there was a kind of bleak emptiness to the room, she was beginning to feel uncomfortably like a voyeur, as if she were intruding on the privacy of the people who had slept together here, made love here, conceived their children here. She closed the door very quietly, not even allowing the latch to click.

There was one room left, the last room on the left, just past the master bedroom. She guessed, as she put her hand to the polished brass doorknob, that it was the nursery. Remembering Claire's nervousness about the room,
she opened it an inch, then wider, and finally stepped inside. The room was painted yellow, with a low, narrow, white-painted bed beside the window, a ruffled pillow at the head, a ruffled yellow-and-blue quilt spread over it. In the wall across from the bed was a connecting doorway into the master bedroom, Ruby thought. Beside the door was a white chifforobe decorated with painted baby animals and flowers. Next to the window stood a child's red-painted rocking chair, twin to the one in the music room downstairs.

But unlike the other rooms, this one seemed to hold a number of personal things, for under the window, white-painted shelves displayed a trio of small stuffed brown bears, a red-and-blue ball, a box of wooden alphabet blocks, a painted metal box with a handle on the side—a jack-in-the-box, likely—and several books. But the toys and the books were all new looking, Ruby noticed. Not new in the sense of
modern
, for they definitely had an old-fashioned, Victorian look. They were new in the sense of
unused
.

That's odd, Ruby thought. Frowning, she went over and picked up a small brown bear. Then, suddenly, she felt the shimmer begin, felt herself being pulled, involuntarily, into the bear. But this time she didn't raise her defenses. Instead, she went with the feeling, letting herself go, trying to get a sense, through the little bear, of the child to whom it had belonged, the child who loved it. Little Angela, perhaps? As the baby of the family, just three when she died, Angela would surely have slept in this room, where her mother could hear her and comfort her when she cried. But there was no one who could comfort Rachel.
Rachel, weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted for they were dead.

Ruby turned the bear over and over in her hands, attempting to learn something about it, attempting to
feel
it. But after a moment, she gave up. The bear seemed lifeless, entirely empty of energy, nothing but a cloth shape stuffed with cotton, with two shiny black buttons for eyes and a stitched-on red mouth. Was she getting this feeling because she had for so
long refused to use her gift in any important way, and now that she needed it,
wanted
it, it wasn't available?

Well, maybe. But even as she considered that possibility, she knew that wasn't what was happening here. The poignant truth was that the bear had spent its whole lonely existence, not in the hands of a child, but sitting on a shelf, on
this
shelf. She knew with a sad conviction that Angela had never loved this little bear, had never slept with it, had never even touched it. Regretfully, she put it back in its place on the shelf, and then, one after the other, picked up each of the toys: the other bears, the ball, the blocks, the jack-in-the-box. They all had the same blank and lifeless emptiness. They had never been played with. They had never been loved.

By now feeling deeply perplexed, she turned to the bed and picked up the child's pillow, holding it against her and feeling the same lifelessness. On the top of the bureau, she found a pair of child's white leather shoes, high-top, lace-up little Victorian boots. But the soles were immaculate and the leather showed no signs of wear. And when she opened the drawers of the bureau, she saw tidy stacks of clothing for a little girl of two or three—underclothes, play clothes, little dresses and pinafores, all well-made clothes and beautiful, in the old-fashioned style of a century before. Old-fashioned, yes, but new-looking, never worn. She picked up one of the little pinafores and saw, with a shiver of recognition, the name
Angela
embroidered on it in loopy pink letters. Now she was sure. This had been Angela's nursery for the first three years of her life—the
only
three years of her life.

But there was something wrong with that idea, Ruby knew, for despite all the personal items that made the room look as if a child had once played and slept here, it was no more lived-in than the other rooms on the floor. It was like a stage set, with toys for props and drawers full of costumes. She stood for a moment, looking around, feeling bewildered, trying to puzzle it out. On the one hand, Claire's aunt had insisted that only she and Mrs.
Blackwood had ever lived in the house. On the other, there were five headstones in the graveyard, Angela's among them. And this was Angela's nursery. So why hadn't her pillow been
used
? Why hadn't her boots and little dresses been worn, her stuffed bear loved?

Ruby's shoulders slumped. Well, it was still possible that
she
was the problem. It had been a long day. She was tired and hungry, and she had barely missed being struck by lightning an hour before. And while she was psychic, she wasn't very skilled at it—skilled, that is, in using her gift to pick up information from people's possessions. And since Angela's mother had been in her nineties when she died, over thirty years ago, Angela herself must have been dead for longer than that, a hundred years, perhaps. And surely, in the decades since, the vibrations would have faded.

“When?” Ruby whispered into the twilit air of the empty room. “When did you die, Angela?” She was surprised when she heard her voice—she had thought she was just
thinking
the question, holding it in her mind. But now that the words were out there and audible, hanging in front of her like pale breath on a chilly morning, she went on.

“And
how
?” she persisted. “How did it happen? Did all five of you go at once, or over time? And what about your father? Was it an illness, an epidemic? An accident, or some sort of violent death?
How
?” She paused, and the question echoed eerily in the silence. “Hey, Rachel,” she said softly, “how about a little help here, huh?”

She stood listening for a moment, the aching loneliness of the five little graves in the cemetery, the sadness of the unloved toys, the emptiness of the small, silent bed—all of it washing over her like a chilling wave. But there was nothing more to be learned from this room, and Claire was waiting for her downstairs. She turned toward the door with a sense of something like resignation.

But just as she put her hand to the doorknob, she smelled the faint
scent of violets, the same fragrance she had smelled in the drawing room, and heard the sound of choked sobbing, a woman's hopeless, despairing weeping, just on the other side of the door.

The room had been warm, like the rest of the house, but all of a sudden, the temperature plummeted, as if an icy polar wind had suddenly breezed into the room, sweeping out all the warmth. Ruby stood trembling, cold inside and out, wanting desperately to open the door and comfort the crying woman, yet desperately afraid of what might happen if she did. She would come face-to-face with Rachel, or whatever the thing was that she and Claire had named Rachel. And if she did…

And if she did? She bit her lip until she tasted salty blood. She wasn't sure what would happen, but she knew what she feared. She would be drawn into that restless, unmoored spirit, she would become sister to that undead soul of grief and lost to herself forever.

Feeling the almost irresistible, magnetic attraction, Ruby pressed her forehead against the door, tightening her muscles and her hold on the doorknob, pushing back with all her will and physical strength against the pull of whatever was on the other side, knowing with the most awful certainty that the closed door between her and Rachel was all that was saving her. Saving her from
what
? She didn't know. But she knew that if she opened the door, if she stepped out into the hall, Rachel would take possession of her, would draw her into that terrible grief, would
drown
her in it. And that would be the end of her life as she knew it.